Synopses & Reviews
Koasati Traditional Narratives is the first published collection of oral literature of the Koasati Indians, who at the time of first contact with the West lived in the upper Tennessee River valley but now predominantly reside in western Louisiana. The works were gathered from several narrators between 1910 and 1992 by John R. Swanton, Mary R. Haas, Geoffrey D. Kimball, and others, and are presented in the original Koasati verse and in English translation.and#160;Because the Koasatis were full participants in the high civilization of the Mississippian period, with a complex aristocratic society, their oral literature exhibits considerable sophistication. The narratives are at turns serious, humorous, frightening, ironic, fantastic, and satiric, and serve both as a window to the mythohistoric past of the Koasatis and as a guide to their present. Encounters with Europeans, African slaves, and other Indian groups enabled Koasati narrators to engage their adaptive genius, and many of their tales derive from, among others, the Tunicas, the fables of La Fontaine, and the Book of Genesis. Part 1 includes mythological narratives, including Trickster rabbit stories, origin tales, monster stories, animal tales, medicine origin tales, and Christian tales. Part 2 features semihistorical narratives, including encounter stories and war stories, among others. Multiple renditions of some narratives are included, for traditional narratives were not set texts that were memorized but rather set plot elements through which narrators could display their verbal skills.
Review
"[Kimball]and#160;has performed an invaluable service for students of orally expressed verbal art by documenting a corpus of well-translated, well-presented texts from a community that has been underrepresented in the available literature. Koasati Traditional Narratives is an extremely valuable addition to the library of resources on folklore, literature, and American Indian studies."and#8212;William M. Clements, Journal of Folklore Research
Review
andldquo;These carefully edited texts, in eight Algonquian languages no longer widely spoken, show how pre-modern records can be made accessible to readers interested in the traditional narratives and linguistic styles of an earlier time. They provide models for future philological studies as well as reliable data on some little-known languages.andrdquo;andmdash;David H. Pentland, professor of Algonquian studies at the University of Manitoba and#160;
Synopsis
New Voices for Old Words is a collection of previously unpublished Algonquian oral traditions featuring historical narratives, traditional stories, and legends that were gathered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collection presents them here in their original languages with new English-language translations. Accompanying essays explain the importance of the original texts and their relationships to the early researchers who gathered and, in some cases, actively influenced these texts.and#160;Covering the Northeast, eastern Canada, the Great Lakes, and the Great Plains, the Algonquian languages represented in New Voices for Old Words include Gros Ventre, Peoria, Arapaho, Meskwaki, Munsee-Delaware, Potawatomi, and Sauk, all of which are either endangered or have lost their last speakers; for several of these languages no Native text has ever been published. This volume presents case studies in examining and applying such principles as ethnopoetics to the analysis of traditional texts in several languages of the Algic language family. These papers show how much valuable linguistic and folkloric information can be recovered from older texts, much of it information no longer obtainable from living sources. The result is a groundbreaking exploration of Algonquian oral traditions that are given a new voice for a new generation.
About the Author
David J. Costa is the program director of the Language Research Office at the Myaamia Center at Miami University. He is the author of The Miami-Illinois Language (Nebraska, 2003).